It hardly qualifies as frequent, but we’ve been asked the same question 4 times in the past few weeks, so we figured we might as well explain this publicly:
Why does Left of the Dial always take place on the same weekend as Amsterdam Dance Event?
For those of you who don’t know, Amsterdam Dance Event (or ADE) is the world’s largest and probably most influential showcase festival for electronic music. And yes, obviously, it’s in Amsterdam. So right there you have a number of reasons why we never even considered that Left of the Dial taking place on the same weekend as ADE would be the slightest problem for anyone.
We picked the ADE weekend for a very simple and practical reason: some of the venues we use for Left of the Dial usually put on electronic music, but since everybody who’s into that kind of music is in Amsterdam that specific weekend, they normally wouldn’t be open, giving us the opportunity to turn them into Left of the Dial stages for the weekend.
If there were hundreds of venues suitable for live music in Rotterdam, we could have just as easily picked any other weekend. But there aren’t, so we have to stick to the same October weekend, at least for the foreseeable future.
In all honesty, we never thought this would be a problem for anyone and that says a lot about how narrow-minded we actually are.
What were we thinking? Of course there are loads of people out there who enjoy electronic music just as much as whatever you want to call the type of music Left of the Dial puts on.
To the two people who were particularly vocal about how stupid they feel we are for having Left of the Dial on the same weekend as ADE, we apologize. We’re sorry we’re making you choose between two events for some lame logistical reasons, and we’re even more sorry that we underestimated your broad taste in festivals.
And to all the Left of the Dial fans who had never heard of ADE: we sincerely hope this post didn’t put any ideas in your head… don’t go buying tickets for ADE now, please just stay with us!
Big love,
The date planners of Left of the Dial
